Sex Pistols - God Save Rock’n’Roll
Giving voice to the anxieties and rage of an entire generation, the Sex Pistols embodied the spirit of "punk" between '76 and '78. Thirty years on, however, their historical significance is far greater: through their provocations and incendiary performances, John Lydon and co. revolutionized the very approach to rock music
by
Francesco Paolo Ferrotti
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“Rock'n'roll is the most disgusting, vulgar and evil form of expression, it's a vicious aphrodisiac, it's the favorite music of every delinquent on earth.”
Frank Sinatra, 1957
“We are obscene, lawless, ugly, dangerous and young”
Jefferson Airplane,”We Can Be Together”, 1969
“I am an anti-christ, I am an anarchist”…
John Lydon, “Anarchy in The U.k.”, 1976
Today, the Sex Pistols are rock icons on a par with Rolling Stones, Doors or David Bowie. Not only are they recognized as the leading exponents of the explosive punk era, but also as a band that exerted enormous influence on everything that came after. In 2006, despite their "great refusal", the group was inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame alongside all the other great names. Likewise, their "Never Mind The Bollocks" still features in every survey of the most important rock albums ever made.
Thirty years on, it seems that one of the most irreverent and revolutionary bands of all time has now been definitively "historicized". The same appears to have happened to Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground and many others: scandalous and rebellious in their own time, but then gradually absorbed into "culture" (or at least into rock's subculture). Nothing new under the sun: not just the history of rock, but that of art and literature too, is full of such cases.
And yet, on closer inspection, in the case of the Sex Pistols the scale of the "scandal" still hasn't fully subsided. Just as the art world has still not entirely absorbed the provocations of certain avant-gardes, even ones now considered "historic", so too do the Sex Pistols still spark debate, representing a case that is more unique than rare — a paradox that undermines any attempt to judge rock purely on strictly musical criteria. In fact, there is no other band in the entire history of rock that can boast a reputation of this magnitude on the strength of so little material: just four singles and one album, albeit a landmark and essential one; beyond that, only a handful of other recordings, including a few covers, scattered across a vast galaxy of posthumous compilations, live albums and bootlegs of varying official status, varying usefulness, and often dubious recording quality.
The band's career was also extremely brief, lasting little more than two years, bookended by two dates: November 6, 1975, the day of their first performance, and January 14, 1978, the date of their last concert with the full lineup. Although the band formally remained active for another year, what followed — with the start of the long legal battles between John Lydon and Malcolm McLaren — had little to do with music.
In 1996, and again in 2002 and 2003, the Sex Pistols played the short-reunion card for a handful of live shows, but added nothing to their repertoire, nor indeed to their already well-established legend. It's a legend whose fortunes were also shaped by a story within the story: that of Sid Vicious, the band's second bassist, who died in '79 at just twenty-one, rising from the depths of London to the Olympus of rock and becoming a generational icon.
General premise
The history of the Sex Pistols is rich in dates, events and key figures. Their scant discography is itself just a handful of episodes within this vivid, concrete story, but on its own it would never be enough to grasp the significance of a revolution lived out on the ground (and on stage) by the protagonists of the time. The Sex Pistols were not merely a band: they were also a project, an aesthetic battle, a slogan, and above all the standard-bearers of a musical and cultural movement of enormous scope. The story of the Sex Pistols is, moreover, inseparable from that of the Clash, the Damned, Siouxsie and many other artists and bands who emerged from the same scene and took part in the same events. It is also a story dense with contacts, cultural exchange (and, in part, rivalry) between London and New York.
Aware that any claim to exhaustiveness would be impossible (though Jon Savage came close with his extraordinary "England's Dreaming"), we will trace the key stages of this story, leaving room at the end for a few conclusions.
At this point, only one final premise is needed: there is often debate over how important the Sex Pistols really were to the birth and rise of what we today call "punk". The first thing to consider is this: it is only because the "punk" movement existed, and because its enormous historical impact has reached us, that we can talk about it at all now. We must then admit that, without Lydon and company, what we know today as "punk" would never have existed in the form it did, and therefore would not have reached us as we understand it (or, more likely, would not have reached us at all). Despite some recent attempts (notably the book "Please Kill Me") to downplay their importance, the Sex Pistols are the band thanks to whom punk became a musical and cultural phenomenon famous the world over.
All of this, of course, does not rule out that many other bands contributed, to varying degrees, to shaping that movement; however, asking whether punk would have existed without the Sex Pistols makes about as much sense as asking whether rock'n'roll would have existed without Chuck Berry. Any other answer would distort history: just as Chuck Berry was, in large part, "the" embodiment of rock'n'roll, the Sex Pistols were, in large part, "the" embodiment of punk. Nor would it be useful to retroactively search for supposed traits of "punk" in periods when punk did not exist and could not have existed: in any case, if we wanted to trace the roots of a certain musical attitude, it wouldn't be enough to go back to the Stooges or MC5, as is often assumed — we could go back even further, to the rock'n'roll of the '50s... and perhaps conclude that the very first "punk" was Chuck Berry himself. And, in a way, that would also be true.
But now let's go back to the '70s, specifically to London in 1971...
1971-1975: from "Let it Rock" to the Sex Pistols
The preliminary chapter in the story of the London quartet was written by a twenty-five-year-old Malcolm McLaren when, together with his partner Vivienne Westwood (today the two are a well-known impresario and a celebrated fashion designer), he bought number 430 King's Road. McLaren was an eccentric art student who, during the '60s, had brushed up against certain fringes of Situationism. In the early '70s, he began developing a passion for '50s rock'n'roll and, at the same time, an aversion to hippie culture: sensing that it was nearing its end, he wanted to speed up its demise.
With these ideas in mind, young McLaren opened "Let it Rock", a shop specializing in making and selling retro clothing. The following year, the shop was renamed "Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die": a name that echoed James Dean, the cult of speed, and biker gangs.
McLaren and Westwood began designing increasingly aggressive clothing, and the shop soon drew prominent figures from the music scene: the Kinks, Jimmy Page, Iggy Pop. Among the shop's partners was also Bernard Rhodes, future manager of the Clash.
In the summer of '73, McLaren traveled to the United States to promote his new venture. There he met the New York Dolls and was captivated by the dissonant energy radiating from their music. Back in London, he decided to abandon the retro theme: while retaining a few traces of his '50s obsession, the shop's name was changed to "Sex", and it began specializing in fetish wear. These were the places and the culture from which the Sex Pistols were born.
Often, however, the common belief is that the Sex Pistols were simply four young men recruited by McLaren to promote his shop. Yet that isn't how the story went: the idea of forming the band wasn't McLaren's at all, but came from future guitarist Steve Jones. As early as 1973, a kind of embryonic group already existed (called "The Strand"), featuring, besides the seventeen-year-old Jones on vocals, a young friend of his who would later join the Sex Pistols: drummer Paul Cook. Amid aimless wandering and rough rehearsals, Steve Jones one day decided to approach Malcolm McLaren. At Jones's insistence, McLaren introduced him to Glen Matlock, a young regular at "Sex". Glen had a decent musical grounding, and with his arrival the Strand began rehearsing more seriously and regularly, though they still lacked a proper singer. Their earliest influences were the Faces, the Kinks, and the early Rolling Stones.
Still not particularly interested in Jones's project, McLaren flew back to the States in the winter of '74. Finding the New York Dolls down on their luck, he tried to relaunch their image by dressing them in "Sex" clothing. More importantly, this time McLaren sensed that something was stirring in New York: hanging around Richard Hell, watching the Ramones, Television and Patti Smith in action, he realized something new was in the air and wanted to claim it for himself at all costs. Back in London full of ideas and enthusiasm, he decided to pour all his energy into the band, which had by then already played its first public show. What they needed, though, was a better singer, and with that in mind Steve Jones put down the microphone and set about learning guitar. At first, McLaren wanted Richard Hell or Syl Sylvain of the New York Dolls on vocals. The latter was even put in touch with Jones and the others, but nothing came of it.
One day, the others were introduced to an odd character named John Lydon who, together with his inseparable friend "Sid", had become a regular fixture at "Sex". Johnny was wild, but with an introverted streak. His musical tastes were unusual, ranging from reggae to Captain Beefheart. Showing off his flair for showmanship from the very first audition, John Lydon soon transformed into "Johnny Rotten". The band was finally ready for its musical revolution.
The members of the Sex Pistols — with the sole exception of Glen Matlock — were all troubled young men, coming from broken family situations, eager to vent their rage and frustration. As Jon Savage writes, "the group was caught in a double bind: intelligent individuals within a working-class culture that placed no value on intelligence, yet unable to break free of that culture for lack of opportunity. The result? Terrible frustration."
From the very start there was bad blood between them, and the line-up held together on a precarious balance: Matlock was viewed with suspicion by the others for being too "normal", while Lydon was viewed with equal suspicion for the opposite reasons. The greatest tension would soon be between Lydon and Matlock: the former was the more musical, more pop-minded soul of the band, the latter its antithesis. The former became the lyricist, the latter the author of most of the music. McLaren, however, saw this conflict in a positive light, viewing it as a healthy antagonism useful to a militant band. It was precisely the tension between these opposites that would give rise to the Sex Pistols' fragile alchemy.
All the band members were born in 1956 (except Jones, born in '55), so by the time the band formed in '75 they were all well past legal age. The name was chosen by McLaren, with "Sex" being a promotional nod to his shop.
Over the course of 1975, the term "punk" was increasingly catching on in the States to describe a new underground musical phenomenon. "Punk" was still a rather generic term, however: there wasn't yet a truly unified movement conscious of itself, but rather a cluster of bands united by a hunger for novelty. The term could be applied to artists as different as Television, Ramones, Patti Smith, Suicide, Blondie, Talking Heads. Something new had been born around New York's CBGB's, but it was only in London that this "something" would achieve full self-awareness and become the global-scale revolution we now know as "punk".
1976: Anarchy In The UK
As the echoes from America were now reaching London's doorstep, the Sex Pistols began shaping their own repertoire. One of the first songs they wrote, composed by Glen Matlock with lyrics by John Lydon, was "Pretty Vacant": a hymn to Richard Hell's "blank generation", but with a fresh brand of irreverence and aggression. "Pretty Vacant" is also a good example of how the simplicity of the Sex Pistols' stylistic devices often translates directly into content: at the start of the song, the basic, repeated shift between a note, its octave and its dominant (avoiding the third of the chord) is a precise musical rendering of the idea of emptiness — exactly what the song's lyrics are about.
Among the earliest songs written were also "Seventeen" and "Submission". The latter in particular introduced a dark, introspective dimension into the band's music that, betraying the influence of the Stooges and the Velvet Underground, would help steer it toward the nascent dark-rock sound. Later songs, such as "Bodies" and the cover of "No Fun", confirm this alienated dimension of the Sex Pistols' music.
With a repertoire of just five songs, the band's first gig took place on 6 November 1975. On that occasion, John Lydon unveiled an idea that would later become iconic: a Pink Floyd t-shirt with "I hate" scrawled on it by hand. In their eyes, Pink Floyd represented everything that had betrayed the origins of rock'n'roll and strayed from the music's original vitality and rebellious spirit. With the Sex Pistols, rock had to become young, rebellious and scandalous again; physicality had to triumph over counterpoint, anti-art over artistic pretension, content over form. Not yet knowing how to properly handle their instruments — or perhaps precisely because of that — the four managed to unleash a new, contagious energy, and from that very first gig they claimed their first victim: after seeing them on stage, Stuart Goddard decided to leave his previous band to become the artist we now know as Adam Ant.
The band's first important show outside London was in Manchester: among the audience were Morrissey, future members of Joy Division, and the enthralled Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto. The latter would later say, as so many others would: "My life changed after seeing the Sex Pistols." Shortly afterward, together with Shelley, he decided to form the Buzzcocks.
In the weeks and months that followed, without having recorded a single song, the Sex Pistols wrote a new chapter in rock history: it could be argued that English punk, and everything that stemmed from it, was almost entirely a direct consequence of those historic shows. Every gig quickly became an event, but the excitement often spilled over into fighting and violence among the crowd, frequently involving the band members themselves. Some venues started barring their doors, but the fuse was already lit, the revolution unstoppable: after witnessing the performances of Johnny Rotten and co., bands such as the Clash, the Damned, the Adverts, the Jam, X-Ray Spex, the Slits and many others began to form. Siouxsie, the band's inseparable companion, would soon go on to lay down the rules of dark-rock. Another regular at their shows, Shane McGowan, would a few years later give birth to the Pogues. The list of bands directly influenced by the Sex Pistols would truly be a long one, and the list of artists and bands influenced more or less indirectly is almost endless: from Joy Division to Madonna, from the Violent Femmes to Nirvana, right down to the present day.
From their very first shows, the Sex Pistols introduced a new aesthetic approach to rock and changed the relationship between musicians and audience: they sought antagonism rather than approval, with the musical performance itself taking precedence over the pure sonic experience. The band rewrote the coordinates of rock music, not by questioning its musical forms, but by stripping them down and distorting them into something grotesque and expressionist. What the Sex Pistols did was not just music but also "theatre": not a show with lavish sets and great actors, but a small, bare-bones stage on which the absurd was played out. Like theatrical performances, their songs always live in the moment of the performance itself and its unrepeatable nature. Following this lead, the Adverts would write "One Chord Wonders", a song that captures the emotions tied to the very act of performing itself, introducing a meta-theatrical dimension.
If the Sex Pistols became one of the bands that changed rock, much of the credit lies with John Lydon's innate talent and magnetism. With his chants and his furious, obsessive, alienated singing, Lydon's voice is one of the most original and recognizable in rock history: together with his facial expressions and body language, it's what turns every one of the band's shows into an aesthetic experience (whether "positive" or "negative"). The novelty of "Rotten" is that he doesn't narrate his emotions but acts them out in the first person, living them through his own body language. Each of his performances largely depends on his mood in the moment, and in particular the cover of the Stooges' "No Fun" becomes the song in which the Sex Pistols' singer seems to alienate himself from both the crowd and his bandmates: he gives a different rendition every time, often improvising the words. What Lydon introduced is almost a form of "expressionism" applied to rock, opening up new perspectives and new dimensions of the "self": splitting, alienation, even schizophrenia. The lyrics to songs like "I Wanna Be Me" and "No Feelings" bear witness to this: Lydon's writing is fragmented, almost surreal, often favoring the sound of words over their meaning.
The mask of "Rotten" is what allows Lydon to express the rawest reality and shout it to the world without censorship. At the same time, the distortion of his voice and body language also reveals a kind of staging: Rotten lives caught between reality and fiction, each ambiguously bleeding into the other. Here, though, it isn't life rising to the level of art, but rather art sinking to the level of life: Johnny Rotten is no "Ziggy Stardust" or "Captain Fantastic". He's an almost Pirandellian character, a caricature of himself who fascinates and seduces through his grotesque, alienated presence, forever searching for his own lost identity.
In October 1976, the band went into the studio to record some demos with producer Dave Goodman: this session, together with a second one in January 1977, would give rise to what is known (or unknown) as Spunk, an unofficial album that has circulated since 1977 and was recently reissued on CD. Compared to the later Never Mind The Bollocks, the "Spunk" tapes are far rawer and less polished. While from a strictly technical standpoint the lack of proper production is noticeable, this is nonetheless one of the most intense and genuine documents the four of them ever left behind: not yet compromised by the media industry and not yet a prisoner of its own image, the band manages to bring into the studio the explosive impact of the live shows that were already making them famous. The "Spunk" recordings, featuring the excellent Glen Matlock on bass, are also clear proof that, even without the studio's "tricks", the Sex Pistols were perfectly capable of handling their own material, and that their supposed lack of musical technique was actually an integral part of the stylistic approach and expressive values of their music. Beyond the band's official iconography, these tapes are perhaps the greatest historical testimony to what was the true musical revolution of the Sex Pistols, in 1976.
While Lydon and co. were infecting London audiences with their incendiary performances, Malcolm McLaren was shaping the band's aesthetic and that of the new musical movement. Punk exploded in London because, in a way, it was already present in the English collective imagination: drawing on these lingering cultural echoes, the brilliant impresario drew an ideal line connecting the new punks to the nineteenth-century characters of Dickens's "Oliver Twist", the young, reckless street urchins who lived in London's picturesque, smoke-filled slums. McLaren identified himself with the character of Fagin, the unscrupulous Jew (McLaren himself had Jewish roots) who in the famous novel recruited petty thieves to carry out their robberies: the Sex Pistols were preparing to become the "thieves" of the record industry.
With the collaboration of Vivienne Westwood, the manager also backed the band by dreaming up a series of provocations: after the "anarchy" T-shirt (featuring a portrait of Marx), it was above all the famous "destroy" T-shirt, combining the antichrist with a huge swastika, that caused an uproar. Such was the chaos of symbols and meanings that the band came across as simultaneously militant and politically ambiguous, winning sympathies and stirring hostility on the part of both the far right and the far left.
Although displaying the swastika was nothing new in rock aesthetics (the Stooges had already done it, as had the New York Dolls), McLaren pushed this provocation to the limit. It is nonetheless clear that in 1970s England, which still bore the scars and memories of the war, the swastika was, paradoxically, a symbol with anti-nationalist connotations. It was almost a symbol of chaos and anarchy. Indeed, it is precisely chaos and anarchy that are celebrated on the band's first single, released in November 1976: "Anarchy In The UK" is one of the most incendiary pages in the history of rock, and it became the first true anthem of the punk movement.
Contrary to what one might think, however, "Anarchy In The UK" is not a genuine song of political protest or social commentary (unlike those of the Clash, which, at least in part, were). In reality, the Sex Pistols' battle was fought more on the front of aesthetics than of politics. The slogans and political symbols themselves served to define an aesthetic, not an actual political stance. The "system" they were fighting against was not so much the social one but rather that of the music industry. Their enemies were not politicians, but rockstars. The anarchism they espoused had little to do with philosophical anarchism, and instead served mainly to suggest the idea of "chaos". What Rotten and his bandmates embodied was a genuine aesthetic of chaos and contradiction. That, too, is part of what punk is: the rejection of all values, including consistency. The Sex Pistols are in fact a living contradiction: they were born as anti-rockstars but, in turn, ended up creating new mythologies and turning into rockstars themselves. They wanted to destroy the record industry's system, but then would not hesitate to compromise with that very system, exploiting it as much as possible to their own advantage. In a sense, the revolution carried out by McLaren and the band was fake, engineered. And yet, within the world of rock, it was very real, with plenty of consequences.
In October '76, the band signed a contract with EMI: born in underground circles and cramped venues, the Sex Pistols' music was now ready to conquer the international market and become the new musical phenomenon. In those same months, the four of them increasingly found themselves in the media spotlight: the more the press turned against the band, the more the band benefited from it. And so it happened that, on 1 December 1976, the Sex Pistols were invited onto Bill Grundy's popular TV show. The following day, the band was on the front page of every English newspaper following the insults and provocations directed at the host (who had himself provoked their reaction).
This is the moment when the band truly started to become popular, but also the moment when the first internal and external tensions and crises began to surface. As Jon Savage writes, "the Grundy scandal created the Sex Pistols, but at the same time it killed them". From that moment on, in fact, the band's relationship with the media would become a double-edged sword: in order to live up to their own growing popularity, the Sex Pistols would increasingly head down the road to self-destruction.
A month after the Grundy incident, and despite the good sales of "Anarchy In The UK", EMI decided to drop the band so as not to risk ending up in the dock itself. In response, Rotten and co. would write the song "EMI" about the record company.
After a brief stint with A&M Records, they would end up at the newly founded Virgin. Partly thanks to signing the Sex Pistols, Virgin grew increasingly important; ironically, some years later (in 1992) it would be EMI itself that bought up all its rights...
1977: God Save The Queen
From a stylistic point of view, it is not easy to pin down where the Sex Pistols came from: here too, the only rule seems to be contradiction, the convergence of different influences that are, at the same time, negated in order to form something new. Their music brings together rock'n'roll, garage and glam, all filtered through the most recent developments coming out of the US (Modern Lovers, New York Dolls, Richard Hell, Ramones). A revivalist streak comes from the '50s, from which the Sex Pistols inherited the cult of original rock'n'roll, leather jackets and the whole "live fast, die young" mythology; from the early '70s, meanwhile, they inherited the more "decadent" aspects.
What is absent, or present only by negation, are many elements of '60s culture: hippie philosophy, Woodstock, progressive rock, peace and love, Beatlemania. However, among the bands born in the previous decade, one can detect the influence of the Velvet Underground, the Stooges and MC5 (the first for their sexual attitude, the second for their performance elements, the third for their unruly, provocative rock). But one must not underestimate, as is often the case, the great legacy of British bands: the much-reviled Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Small Faces, the Animals, the Who and T-Rex. One last musical influence can be traced back to John Lydon's unusual tastes, in particular the surreal noise of Captain Beefheart. Lastly, the Sex Pistols' aesthetic owes something, too, to David Bowie.
It may also be worth recalling the band's cover repertoire, which ranged from a shambolic version of "Johnny Be Good" to the Who's "Substitute", from the Stooges' "No Fun" to the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner", all the way to the Monkees' "Steppin' Stone". Sid Vicious, as a solo artist, also tried his hand at a couple of Eddie Cochran classics ("Something Else" and "C'mon Everybody"). In all these cases, it's impossible to tell parody apart from homage. In one case, however, the parody is explicit and openly declared: in the version of "My Way" that Sid Vicious sang, with altered lyrics. In 1957, Frank Sinatra had claimed that rock was ugly, dirty, vicious music. In the '70s, the Sex Pistols rediscovered the original foundations of that music, sweeping away all intellectual superstructures and showing rock (and the world) for what it really is.
1977 is the year in which the punk revolution exploded, especially in media terms: in the year Elvis Presley died, having been the symbol of rock'n'roll, that spirit seems to be reincarnated in new forms, rediscovered by a new generation of rebels. The revolution led by the Sex Pistols is almost comparable to a second explosion of rock'n'roll, updated for the '70s. Originally, rock'n'roll had been born as noisy, unruly music, an anti-artistic art form and an anti-musical musical form, in which performative skills and sexual attitude took precedence over the pursuit of pleasant sounds. Sweeping away the "peace and love" era, with all its utopias and hypocrisies, the Sex Pistols became the spokesmen for a new generational clash, leading the youth revolt against bloated rockstars and progressive rock dinosaurs. The "punk" revolution brought short hair and, in music, rejected everything that was "ornament"; instead, it sought simple forms of expression to shout the most authentic emotions out to the world in all their immediate urgency. In 1977, the Sex Pistols not only embodied the spirit of punk, but were the flagbearers of a new rock generation.
Although the band's success was rapidly on the rise, at the same time, the new year opened under the sign of growing uncertainty. In February, Glen Matlock left the band: a sign that something was starting to go wrong. After Matlock's departure — the band's one true musical mind and author of most of its songs — the Sex Pistols began to spiral out of control: the fragile balance between music and performance, between life and art, started to crumble. The performative elements increasingly overpowered the musical ones, and the band was forced to live up to the huge media circus building up around it. With Sid Vicious coming in as bassist, incidents of thuggery multiplied and drug use increased: the band's image became ever more aggressive and dangerously unstable, both on stage and off.
1977 was also the year of the Queen's Jubilee, and the four of them were ready for the occasion. Their gift was "God Save The Queen": an anti-(national)-anthem that ends up, by negation, taking on the scope of a (generational) anthem. Released in March 1977, despite numerous bans and boycotts, the single was a huge success and the only discordant voice amid the collective euphoria over the Jubilee. The song still bears Glen Matlock's songwriting credit, while the lyrics are, as usual, John Lydon's idea.
In "God Save The Queen" you can feel an apocalyptic atmosphere, painting a picture of a society that needs its national myths to hide its own unstoppable decay. The band's Nazi-tinged imagery, combined with the "no future" slogan, turns the Jubilee celebrations into a carnival of collective madness that carries the unease of a "memento mori". Behind the anger and the biting irony, there's a tragic dimension running through the Sex Pistols' music: it's not just the voice of the marginalized, but also the expression of a kind of existential anguish and discomfort. From "no future" would come many of the ideas that fed into dark/goth music, and the tragedy would become reality first with Sid Vicious, then with Ian Curtis.
And yet, unlike what would later come from Joy Division, the Sex Pistols' music still holds vital instincts: with its aggression and iconoclastic fury, punk is the music of survival in a world (inner and outer) on the brink of collapse.
"Never Mind The Bollocks" and the end of the band
Preceded by the release of the singles "Pretty Vacant" and "Holidays In The Sun", Never Mind The Bollocks, the only Sex Pistols album, came out in October 1977. Defying censorship and sales obstacles, it quickly shot to number one on the UK charts and was destined to become one of the most popular albums in rock history.
Produced by Chris Thomas (who had also worked with the Beatles on the "White Album"), it's a record that's monumental in certain respects, and it contains at least three songs that can be called true generational anthems: the aforementioned "God Save The Queen", "Anarchy In The Uk", and "Pretty Vacant".
Contrary to what a superficial listen might suggest, even from a strictly musical standpoint it's a flawless album with excellent production, worthy of the band's reputation. In a 1992 interview, Kurt Cobain stated it was the best-produced record he had ever heard. Those who describe it as rudimentary or poorly made are, in fact, confusing two different things: you have to distinguish between a song played badly (because of an out-of-tune instrument, an inability to keep time, or wrong notes played instead of the right ones) and a song played exactly the way it was stylistically conceived. In "Never Mind The Bollocks" there are no mistakes, no wrong notes, no sloppy playing, and as for it not being especially complex musically, it isn't - to the same degree that hundreds of rock albums before it weren't either (from Elvis's debut to Bob Dylan, from the early Rolling Stones and beyond).
Starting with the stunning opening trio "Holidays In The Sun" - "Bodies" - "No Feelings", the Sex Pistols' sound is tight, powerful, hugely impactful. It's the sound of a great rock'n'roll band. In "Anarchy In The Uk", through numerous overdubs, the song reaches a grand rock symphonism that gives it the status of an anthem.
Steve Jones's guitar holds up a wall of distortion but, unlike Johnny Ramone's playing, leans more towards hard rock and at times doesn't skimp on guitar riffs. In those few but powerful chords lies, in an almost minimalist form, twenty years of rock'n'roll guitar: from Chuck Berry to Keith Richards, from Marc Bolan to Johnny Thunders.
John Lydon's vocal performance is extraordinary throughout the album, showing great skill in handling a wide vocal range (as in the remarkable shift from verse to chorus in "Bodies"). The drums and bass are perfectly in step and cohesive in managing the emotional tension.
Perhaps the only regret is that, during the album's recording, some of Glen Matlock's bass parts were sacrificed - the ones we can hear on "Spunk" - replaced instead with simpler, more linear, "Ramones-style" parts recorded by Steve Jones.
After the uproar surrounding the album, the final chapter of the Sex Pistols' story was written during the band's ill-fated American tour, which ended on November 17 at the Winterland in San Francisco: documented in an easily available video, it's their last live show. Watching that footage, you can easily sense the darkness, the chill, and the unease that pervades that final performance. At the end of the show, an exhausted John Lydon warns "you'll only get one encore": it could only be "No Fun". Never had the Stooges cover been so surreally fitting: the show is over, there's no fun left, only bitterness and regret remain. A few days later, due to growing hostility with Malcolm McLaren, Lydon would leave his bandmates. In the following months, after a long legal battle with his former manager began, Lydon would go on to form Public Image. Steve Jones and Paul Cook, meanwhile, carried on for another year, but by then the Sex Pistols were a band in name only.
Referring readers elsewhere for more detailed accounts of everything that followed, here we'll only consider two chapters of the post-Lydon story: the death of Sid Vicious and the "Rock'n'Roll Swindle" operation.
Sid Vicious: live fast, die young
John Simon Richie, better known as "Sid Vicious", left posterity at least three things worth noting: the first two are the invention of the "pogo" and the legendary rendition of "My Way". The third, and most important, is his own iconic image. Sid didn't add much to the Sex Pistols' music (with the exception of "Belsen Was A Gas"), but he made a fundamental contribution to the aesthetics and mythology of rock itself: while the Sex Pistols' music influenced the output of countless bands, Sid Vicious influenced the collective imagination.
Dusting off the myth of James Dean, the "live fast, die young" ethos, Sid updated it for the more decadent era of Lou Reed and David Bowie: from the former he took his nickname ("Vicious", from the song on "Transformer") and the glorification of heroin; from the latter he inherited the hairstyle and the blurring of art and life.
In 1977, however, Bowie and Reed were polished rockstars, by then shielded from their own excesses, whereas Sid was just a kid who dreamed of becoming a rockstar, willing to go to any excess to become one. Before joining the Sex Pistols, his story was the same as that of so many other outcasts like him: he'd been thrown out of home at fifteen, and had lived by his wits. After becoming the band's number one fan, a fixture at London punk gigs, he did his first rehearsals alongside Siouxsie, in the original nucleus of what would become Siouxsie and The Banshees.
Sid had a rudimentary technique, but he showed the right personality: in February 1977, after Glen Matlock's departure, he finally got the chance to become the Sex Pistols' bassist. But in reality Sid didn't become part of the band's music, so much as part of their spectacle: perverse and fragile, violent and reckless, he increasingly made "drugs, sex and rock'n'roll" his lifestyle. But Sid's fragile identity couldn't survive for long the myths that fed it; contributing to such an unstable personality was his use of heroin, to which he was introduced by his girlfriend Nancy Spungen: Sid and Nancy soon found themselves bound by a perverse relationship of mutual self-destruction, which would lead both of them to die within a few months of each other.
In the theatre of the absurd and cruelty set up by the Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, though complementary figures, stood apart: unlike John, Sid took his role to such an extreme that he ended up making every fiction real. Where John Lydon was torn by a conflict between himself and his persona, and gave his best when staging the torment of that split, Vicious instead increasingly began to identify with the character itself and was no longer able to distance himself from it, even partially. While Rotten was aware of his role, and at times even rejected it, Vicious became a puppet in the hands of Malcolm McLaren and the media: both on stage and off, his performances became ever more extreme and real, reaching the point where it's no longer possible to distinguish fiction from reality, art from life (and from death).
After the Sex Pistols broke up in '78, Sid tried to launch a career as a vocalist, putting together a series of one-off bands with musicians like Mick Jones, Glen Matlock, Keith Levene, Rat Scabies, Johnny Thunders and others. Some of this material is collected on the posthumous album Sid Sings (1979), along with two of the three covers he recorded as a solo artist: the already mentioned "My Way", "Something Else" and "C'mon Everybody". The writer of the latter two covers is Eddie Cochran, one of the first rock'n'roll musicians, who died at twenty-one in a car accident. And this is where the circle closes: the story of the Sex Pistols, born out of Malcolm McLaren's cult of the Fifties, ended with a death that brought back to life one of rock'n'roll's founding mythologies: the "rebel youth" of James Dean. Albeit in a more perverse and transgressive version, the "sex pistols" prove to be the heirs of that "live fast" culture and its inseparable companion: "die young".
On the night of 11 October 1978, Nancy was found dead. Sid was arrested as the sole suspect. To this day, it's impossible to fully clarify what happened on that fatal night of blood and madness. February 1st, 1979 was Sid's turn, felled by a heroin overdose: he'd often said he didn't want to live past twenty-one, and he kept his word. His icon, however, survived, enshrined in rock's pantheon alongside so many other "heroes" who died too soon: Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Jim Morrison, Marc Bolan, Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain.
As an early confirmation of the impact Sid Vicious had on the collective imagination, a few years later the story of Sid and his girlfriend inspired the film "Sid and Nancy" (1986), directed by Alex Cox.
The great rock'n'roll swindle?
"The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle" is the title of a film released in 1980: directed by Julian Temple, it tells the story of the Sex Pistols from Malcolm McLaren's point of view. The soundtrack is a collection of all the band's provocations, with a few guests and a few new tracks: among others, there's room for Sid Vicious's "My Way" and "Belsen Was A Gas", a nazi-tinged track with a raw guitar riff worthy of the "worst" of the New York Dolls; also worth mentioning are "Lonely Boy" and "Silly Thing", two tracks written by Jones and Cook in the post-Lydon era. Among the "special guests" is McLaren himself, who takes a stab at vocals on "You Need Hands".
For the making of the film, the Sex Pistols (almost) played themselves. In reality, participation in filming was limited to Vicious, Cook and Jones alone; John Lydon, due to his outright refusal, only appears in archive footage. The film can largely be considered a work of Malcolm McLaren's, and in turn, its subject is his (slanted) account of how the Pistols themselves were nothing but his creation, unwitting tools of a shrewd commercial operation. While giving the appearance of being a documentary, the film seems to hand all the Sex Pistols' detractors a wealth of ammunition. But beware: the film itself is, in turn, a fiction, and its documentary intent is blatantly fake and cartoonish... so where does reality end and fiction begin?
Things are then far more complex than a naive reading might suggest, and the film itself resists any naive, straightforward reading: being deliberately "exaggerated", McLaren's point of view doesn't require the viewer's full agreement (nor outright rejection), but rather prompts reflection. In truth, what we're faced with is above all a provocation, aimed in particular at the music establishment. In "The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle", the Sex Pistols themselves stage their own technical limitations and the fact that they were manipulated by a shrewd manager who, thanks to them, managed to enrich himself at the record companies' expense. But all of this is also part of a script: a script in which McLaren is a cunning puppeteer and the Sex Pistols are his unwitting puppets. Not only is the script not hidden, it's precisely what's being performed on stage, as in meta-theatre: the company's director stages the story of his own theatre troupe, using the actual actors to play themselves, and playing himself in turn.
In "The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle" the theatrical dimension is explicit, with paradoxical and estranging effects: where is the author, and where is the work? If McLaren appears to be the "author" of the band, he's also a "character" in the show he himself created, just as in the film he plays himself. On the other hand, those who should be the characters (Vicious above all) can only be, at the same time, "actors", and therefore also "authors" of their own performance as actors. Although the film doesn't document the band's actual history, but rather exaggerates it so as to highlight only certain aspects at the expense of others, part of the Sex Pistols' fascination lies precisely in this ambiguity, where it's impossible to distinguish reality from fiction, the work from its author, Rotten from Lydon.
If the live shows were the band's most genuine and authentic expression, The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle sits at the opposite extreme: here, artifice takes center stage, taking on the guise of a "swindle". The true artist seems to become McLaren, while the Sex Pistols become merely a "work". This doesn't mean the Sex Pistols were truly a manufactured band, as the film seems to suggest; rather, part of their "truth" lay precisely in staging their own artificiality too (as we've seen, it's precisely in the conflict between mask and individual, between Lydon and Rotten, that the band finds its finest expression). The Sex Pistols are marked by a constant tension between opposites: between music and spectacle, between art and life, between truth and fiction; the band's nature can never be pinned down to just one of these opposing poles, but lies precisely in the contradiction and ambiguity in which one thing turns into the other.
There is, however, one point where the extremes come to coincide: fiction becomes reality and the actor is so thoroughly ensnared by his character that he ends up its victim. We're talking, of course, about Sid Vicious. Sid is at once the best and the worst actor in the film, because he's the only one who isn't "acting": in him, truth and fiction perfectly coincide. The exact opposite is true of John Lydon, who embodies the gap and conflict between the two: appearing only in "real" footage clips, he's the only one who isn't an actor, thereby exposing the film's artifice.
But there's more: "The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle" doesn't just rewrite the band's history, it also contains a few more general food for thought, almost an implicit sketch of rock history itself. Even the title itself reveals a form of ambiguity: the Sex Pistols are the greatest swindle, but potentially all of rock'n'roll is a swindle. Lending support to this reading, the soundtrack features two emblematic r'n'r anthems in punk versions: "Rock Around The Clock" (Bill Haley) and "Johnny Be Good" (Chuck Berry). But what does all this mean?
The story of the "rock'n'roll swindle" was actually old news: looking closely, the first "rock'n'roll swindle" had been none other than the father of that music himself, namely Elvis Presley. Elvis was, in fact, more a work than an author: he was almost an actor, that is, a great interpreter and performer, but not a true musician. And yet, how many other such cases, more or less overt, has rock history seen? In the film, McLaren flips the perspective: the Sex Pistols' "swindle" is openly declared, exaggerated, shameless, and succeeds precisely because it is so.
In an age when any kind of refusal can be disguised and passed off as "art", and when pop-rock itself is sometimes passed off as "art" thanks to the skill of clever managers and producers, McLaren shows his hand and explicitly stages the theme of the swindle: just like the Sex Pistols, rock tout court (and art in general) is potentially nothing but a con. But perhaps this is precisely where the perspective can be flipped once again: one of the fathers of contemporary art, Marcel Duchamp, taught that the genius of contemporary art lies in having an idea that passes off a potential swindle (such as his "Fountain") as a form of art. His own art was, in large part, a practical self-demonstration of this very principle, and so it always contained a reflection on the very nature of art. With the Sex Pistols film, Malcolm McLaren carries out a similar meta-artistic operation, sending out a hugely important general message that also serves as a self-demonstration of the band's success: rock is a form of contemporary art, it is aesthetics in the broad sense more than music in the strict sense, and it can be "art" more through its (conceptual) anti-artistic status than through its (technical) pursuit of artistic expression. This is the most interesting thesis to be drawn from "The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle". From here, we can draw a few threads for some final considerations.
The historical legacy of the Sex Pistols
The Sex Pistols entered rock history in a peculiar way: they disowned its past, rejected its evolution, questioned its intellectual worth, and restored the primacy of performance over music in the strict sense. And yet, in doing all this, they wrote a new and important chapter of that very same "history". In truth, their rejection of the past went hand in hand with an operation that recovered what is the original nature of the rock'n'roll style: with their provocations and their disruptive performances, they reminded everyone that rock is above all performance, spectacle, physicality, and that it has never required high-level musical skill. It's often forgotten that earlier bands such as Rolling Stones, Who, Stooges, MC5, had a musical approach that was in some ways similar to that of the Sex Pistols and the "punk" bands.
Looking closely, rock history has known few true "musicians" in the proper sense of the term; what it has in abundance, however, is every kind of colourful, delinquent character, and the most outlandish subcultures imaginable. For anyone who hadn't noticed, rock is not just music: it's an integral part of the collective imagination, it's modern mythology.
The Sex Pistols were, then, simply an extreme version of traits that have always been part of rock. However, the band's innovative impact lies precisely in that "extremization": often with a self-ironic streak, they were perhaps the first to carry out a meta-musical operation, that is, an implicit reflection on the very nature of rock'n'roll itself. Sex Pistols' music always carries a form of "militant criticism", above all aimed at itself. In particular, their cover repertoire is full of references to rock's past, sometimes in the form of parody, and often accompanied by explicit statements of position: "I Hate Pink Floyd" is the simplest and most direct example of this. As proof of the self-ironic side of the operation, Steve Jones had "Guitar Hero" written on his amplifier, and on stage he mockingly parodied the poses of the great rock guitarists. As we've seen, most of Lydon and co.'s provocations were aimed at the aesthetic side and at rock history, not at the political-social sphere.
The Sex Pistols were certainly not the first band to cause a scandal, to be tainted by unpleasant episodes, or to be subjected to censorship and "witch hunts". Rock history, from its very origins, is full of precedents: in the Sixties, for instance, the Rolling Stones had stirred up a similar wave of scandal with their provocations around drugs and sex, both in their songs and in their off-stage lifestyle. There is, however, one difference: the Sex Pistols didn't just push the provocation on the level of content, they also pushed it on a formal level, on a strictly musical level.
As proof of just how far-reaching the provocation was, this remains one of the most debated subjects whenever the band is discussed. In "The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle", Malcolm McLaren voices the paradox according to which "a band that can't play is better than a band that can play". If the band in question is the Sex Pistols, then this can certainly be true. But how is it possible for a band that "can't play" to become a huge musical phenomenon with so many heirs? Today, used as we are to acts truly manufactured by clever managers and producers, incapable of playing except to a backing track (and seemingly brilliant precisely for that reason), perhaps this isn't so surprising. But the Sex Pistols were a different matter: they were a genuine band, and they could play their own music. They certainly didn't have the technical skill of Pink Floyd, but that's irrelevant to the extent that they were opposing everything Pink Floyd stood for. Their disregard for technique was the expression of an aesthetic conception that was the exact opposite of that held by "technical" bands. This means that, looked at closely, the Sex Pistols' musical technique was not "lacking" at all: it was an integral part of the style and content of their music (just as, in a different way, Pink Floyd's technique is part of theirs). After all, how can you "play well" a song conceived specifically to express "dissonant" emotions? It would be a bit like trying to paint Munch's "The Scream" "well" (in a classical manner)...
What matters most is that the Sex Pistols were the first to explicitly deny the primacy of musical technique, going so far as to mock it outright. In the practice of rock, however, this was hardly new: the world is full of bands that can barely play, and so is rock history. The difference is that most "artists" generally do everything they can to hide it, while Lydon and co. did exactly the opposite: by making their (relative) technical limitations plain to see, they staged them and turned them into an integral part of their show. By turning their own performance into theatre, they made the importance of musical technique even more relative: a Sex Pistols gig was conceived first and foremost as a piece of spectacle, in which music in the strict sense was only one component, not the only one: John Lydon's singing was always halfway between music and speech, and it's never possible to tell where the music ends and where the elements of performance begin. So while their live shows may have been sparse from a technical-musical point of view, they were nonetheless magnificent from a conceptual-performative one: the Sex Pistols weren't great musicians, but they were great stage animals. For this reason, to understand the band's historical significance, it's essential to also watch the visual documents, the live footage that has survived (for example, the 1978 show at the LongHorn in Dallas, now also available on DVD).
For a moment, let's imagine that the Sex Pistols were talented musicians playing the part of people who couldn't play "well". Insofar as it's the result that counts, the result would be the same. To a large extent, that's exactly what happened: while it's true that the four of them weren't skilled musicians, it's equally true that they usually made an effort to play their "worst", often with a self-ironic edge. This is also why, at times, the effect worked all the better the "worse" they played, that is, the greater the distortion the music (and especially Lydon's voice) underwent. Rock is full of "terrifying" live recordings: the Sex Pistols managed to turn that "terrifying" quality into an aesthetic experience, expanding rock's aesthetic scope to include what had previously been considered simply "ugly".
With their disregard for "polish" in favour of expression, the Sex Pistols helped introduce into popular music a principle that, at least since the advent of Expressionism, seems to have become an accepted tenet of modern aesthetics: the value of a work of art does not lie in the complexity of its style, or in greater or lesser technical skill, but in everything that is expressed through that style and technique. After decades of avant-gardes, of art and anti-art of every kind, not only does this principle now seem obvious, but another has also taken hold: that the idea matters more than the craftsmanship, and that the artist's expression matters more than the work itself. By pushing these principles to the extreme, the Sex Pistols helped establish a new kind of musical search, freed from all redundant technicality and aimed instead at making every technique strictly functional to expression. After the Sex Pistols, anyone who had "something to say" could say it without worrying about technique, letting it always remain a means and never an end.
It is no exaggeration to say that, within pop-rock, the Sex Pistols' provocations play a role comparable to that of the Dadaists' provocations (or perhaps the Futurists') in the world of visual art. Looked at closely, even without being fully aware of it, they absorbed the most extreme principles of twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes, blending them with "pop art" and applying them to the world of rock music: the rejection of technique in favour of expression, the questioning (to the point of parody) of the artist's role, performance taking the place of the work, chance and "chaos" in art, the pursuit of scandal and antagonism with the audience, the work conceived as a slogan, as a critique of the art system itself, as an anti-work and as anti-art. The difference is that, whereas certain forms of avant-garde anti-art were soon absorbed back into art circuits and museums, the Sex Pistols were (and still are) genuinely removed from any artistic ambition in the strict sense.
The band's recent refusal to be inducted into the "Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame" is, then, proof that theirs is a form of "art" that's still alive, one that refuses to be resigned to being embalmed in "museums" and rock history books. This is also why specialist critics often avoid tackling the Sex Pistols head-on: they tend to recall mainly their historical importance, in an attempt to dodge an analysis on aesthetic grounds that risks disturbing certain comfortable certainties useful to that "museum of rock".
Thirty years have now passed since 1977, and more than fifty since the birth of rock'n'roll, but the Sex Pistols' music still seems able to hold onto its anti-conformist spirit, stubbornly evading every attempt to fold it back into the horizon of "culture".
It occurs to me that this piece, in its own small way, may have gone in the opposite direction. But then again, contradiction, as we know, is the very essence of rock'n'roll.
(25/07/2007)
Essential bibliography:
John Savage – Il Sogno Inglese (Arcana ed.)
Dave Laing – Punk, storia di una sottocultura rock (E.D.T, 1991)
Federico Guglielmi – Punk, piccola enciclopedia (Giunti)
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Sex Pistols on OndaRock
Discography
| SEX PISTOLS | ||
| Never Mind The Bollocks (Virgin, 1977) | 9 |  |
| Spunk! (bootleg, 1977; reissued 2006) | 7.5 |  |
| The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (soundtrack, 1979) | 7 | |
| Filthy Lucre Live (Live, 1996) | 6 | |
| SID VICIOUS | ||
| Sid Sings (1979) | 6.5 |
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